Label Files and Projects

See Also

VSS uses version numbers to keep track of every change you make to your files and projects. This gives you the ability to retrieve any version of a file or project.

VSS keeps track of old versions in 3 ways - by internal version number, by date, and by user-defined labels. 

Version Number

The internal version number is assigned and maintained by VSS. VSS gives every version of a file and project a version number, and displays it in the History of File or History of Project Details dialog box. This version number is always a whole number.

Labels

Far more useful, however, are user-defined labels. You can associate a label with any version of any file or project. A label can be a string of up to 31 characters. Any of the following are valid labels: "1.0", "2.01b", "Final Beta", and "Approved for QA". After you apply these labels, you can retrieve files associated with a particular state of your project from the History dialog box, which is accessed from the Show History command on the Tools menu.

You will probably find that at a project level, you refer to user-defined labels, and not internal version numbers. On the other hand, it is rare to label individual files.

Note   When you label a project with a descriptive text string, all the files in that project and subproject inherit the label.

Consider the following when you use the Label command:

• When you use the Label command, you create a new version in History of the selected project or file, however, the file or project itself remains the same.
  
  
• If you assign a label to a version that already has a label, you overwrite the old label. VSS issues a warning before removing the old label.
  
  
• When you edit a label in the History Details dialog box, you do not create a new version of the file or project, you merely assign a new label to an existing version.
  
  
• If you add a label to a version of a file or project in which the label already existed on another version, you will be prompted to remove the old label.

For information on how to label files and projects in VSS, refer to:

• How to Label Files and Projects

For information on how to maintain multiple versions of a project at the same time, refer to:

• Maintain Multiple Versions of a Project